Carolyn Castaño’s 37-part monoprint series Drug Lord and Patron features Pablo Escobar and Andrés Escobar, two figures whose fates are intertwined by the cartel’s funding of soccer. She explores the infamy of the drug lord and the tragic end of the soccer player. In this work, Pablo's stoic face is surrounded by decorative flowers and cocoa orchids. Blood from his cartel killings drips down near a human skull. In an interview, Castaño stated, “violence from the cartel bleeds to Andrés,” who bears a sorrowful face in the print as soccer balls encompass him.
As a Columbian, Carolyn Castaño, a professor of Drawing and Painting at Long Beach City College, grew up with the ghost of Escobar. He first appears in her art with the series Its Complicated (2009) centered on drug couples. Her work evolved to making world cup screen-printed t-shirts on soccer players killed from political affiliation or other associations (2015). El Nopal Press caught sight of her artistic practice and invited her to do a monoprint/lithoprint series, guiding her through the processes of printing from drawings in oil paint and burning (or exposing) photosensitive metallic plates to light for image transfer. From this collaboration came the Drug Lord and Patron series.
Description written by Matt Mageno, 2026.